Shanil Virani

Shanil Virani is Director of the state-of-the-art, hybrid John C. Wells Planetarium at JMU. He did his graduate work at Yale University where he studied supermassive black holes lurking at the centers of galaxies in the nearby and distant Universe. Prior to Yale, Virani spent 5+ years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as part of the Science Team of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's flagship space-based X-ray mission. He hosts Our Island Universe, a weekly 90-second segment on WMRA Public Radio (local NPR affiliate), that looks at new discoveries in our understanding of what lies beyond the horizon and what it means to us here on Earth. Virani desires to attract kids to science through space and can speak to science education trends, space and STEM.

He recieved his M.S. and M. Phil. from Yale University, and his B.A. and B.S. from the University of Waterloo.